At a 1992 banquet sponsored by the American Film Institute (AFI), a bevy of actors, filmmakers, and others gathered to pay tribute to Sidney Poitier. Superstar Denzel Washington called the veteran actor and director “a source of pride for many African Americans,” the Los Angeles Times reported, while acting luminary James Earl Jones ventured that his colleague had “played a great role in the life of our country.” Poitier himself was typically humble in the face of such praise, but he has acknowledged that his presence on film screens in the 1950s and 1960s did much to open up larger and more nuanced roles for black performers. “I was selected almost by history itself,” he averred to Susan Ellicott of the London Times.

After gracing dozens of films with his dignified, passionately intelligent presence, Poitier began to focus increasingly on directing; a constant in his life, however, has been his work on behalf of charitable causes. And he has continued to voice the need for film projects that, as he expressed it to Los Angeles Times writer Charles Champlin, “have a commonality with the universal human condition.”

Born in Miami, Florida, but raised in the Bahamas, Poitier experienced severe poverty as a boy. His father, a tomato farmer, “was the poorest man in the village,” the actor recalled in an interview with Frank Spotnitz for American Film. “My father was never a man of self-pity,” he continued, adding that the elder Poitier “had a wonderful sense of himself. Every time I took a part, from the first part, from the first day, I always said to myself, ‘This must reflect well on his name.’” The family moved from the tiny village of Cat Island to Nassau, the Bahamian capital, when Poitier was 11 years old, and it was there that he first experienced the magic of cinema.

After watching, rapt, as a western drama transpired on the screen, Poitier ran to the back of the theater to watch the cowboys and their horses come out. After watching the feature a second time, he again went out to wait for the figures from the screen to emerge. Poited told the Los Angeles Times, “And when I told my friends what had happened, they laughed and they laughed and they said to me, ‘Everything you saw was on film.’ And they explained to me what film was. And I said, ‘Go on.’”

Career: Worked as dishwasher and as janitor at American Negro Theater, New York City, early 1940s; stage appearances include Days of Our Youth, Lysistrata, Anna Lucasta, and A Raisin in the Sun; appeared in numerous films; wrote screenplay, For Love of Ivy, 1965; Free of Eden, executive producer, 1999; wrote autobiography, This Life, 1981; wrote second memoir, The Measure of A Man, 2000; named Bahamas’ ambassador to Japan, 1997-.

Memberships: Named to board of directors of Walt Disney Corporation, 1994-.

Poitier made his way to New York at age 16, serving for a short time in the Army. He has often told the story of his earliest foray into acting, elaborating on different strands of the tale from one recitation to the next. He was a teenager, working as a dishwasher in a New York restaurant. “I didn’t study in high school,” he told American Film’s Spotnitz. “I never got that far. I had no intentions of becoming an actor.” Seeing an ad for actors in the Amsterdam News, a Harlem-based newspaper, he went to an audition at the American Negro Theater. “I walked in and there was a man there—big strapping guy. He gave me a script.”

The man was Frederick O’Neal, a cofounder of the theater; impatient with young Poitier’s Caribbean accent and shaky reading skills, O’Neal lost his temper: “He came up on the stage, furious, and grabbed me by the scruff of my pants and my collar and marched me toward the door,” the actor remembered to Los Angeles Times writer Champlin. “Just before he threw me out he said, ‘Stop wasting people’s time! Why don’t you get yourself a job as a dishwasher.’” Stunned that O’Neal could perceive his lowly status, Poitier knew he had to prove his antagonist wrong. “I have, and had, a terrible fierce pride,” Poitier told the audience at the American Film Institute fête, as reported by Daily Variety. “I determined right then I was going to be an actor.”

Poitier continued in his dishwashing job; in his spare time he listened assiduously to radio broadcasts, he noted to Champlin, “trying to lighten the broad A that characterizes West Indian speech patterns.” He had some help in one aspect of his informal education, however: Daily Variety quoted his speech at the AFI banquet, in which he thanked “an elderly Jewish waiter in New York who took the time to teach a young black dishwasher how to read, persisting over many months.” Ultimately, Poitier returned to the American Negro Theater, persuading its directors to hire him as a janitor in exchange for acting lessons.

Poitier understudied for actor-singer Harry Belafonte in a play called Days of Our Youth, and an appearance one night led to a small role in a production of the Greek comedy Lysistrata. Poitier, uncontrollably nervous on the latter play’s opening night, delivered the wrong lines and ran off the stage; yet his brief appearance so delighted critics, most of whom otherwise hated the production, that he ended up getting more work. “I set out after that to dimensionalize my understanding of my craft,” he told Champlin.

Poitier made his film debut in the 1950 feature No Way Out, portraying a doctor tormented by the racist brother of a man whose life he couldn’t save. Director Joseph Mankiewicz had identified Poitier’s potential, and the film bore out the filmmaker’s instincts. Poitier worked steadily throughout the 1950s, notably in the South African tale Cry, the Beloved Country, the classroom drama The Blackboard Jungle, and the taut The Defiant Ones, in which Poitier and Tony Curtis played prison escapees manacled together; their mutual struggle helps them look past racism and learn to respect each other. Poitier also appeared in the film version of George Gershwin’s modern opera Porgy and Bess.

It was in the 1960s, however—with the civil rights movement spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and others gathering momentum—that Poitier began to make his biggest mark on American popular culture. After appearing in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, in a role he’d developed on the stage, he took the part of an American serviceman in Germany in the 1963 production Lilies of the Field. This role earned him a best actor statuette at the Academy Awards, making him the first black actor to earn this honor.

“Most of my career unfolded in the 1960s, which was one of the periods in American history with certain attitudes toward minorities that stayed in vogue,” Poitier reflected to Ellicott of the London Times. “I didn’t understand the elements swirling around. I was a young actor with some talent, an enormous curiosity, a certain kind of appeal. You wrap all that together and you have a potent mix.”

The mix was more potent than might have been anticipated, in fact; by 1967 Poitier was helping to break down filmic barriers that hitherto had seemed impenetrable. In To Sir, With Love Poitier played a charismatic schoolteacher, while In the Heat of the Night saw him portray Virgil Tibbs, a black detective from the North who helps solve a murder in a sleepy southern town and wins the grudging respect of the racist police chief there. Responding to the derisive labels flung at him, Poitier’s character glowers, “They call me Mister Tibbs.” The film’s volatile mixture of suspense and racial politics eventually spawned two sequels starring Poitier and a television series (Poitier did not appear in the small screen version).

Even more stunning, Poitier wooed a white woman in the comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; his fiancée’s parents were played by screen legends Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The film was considered a watershed because it was Hollywood’s first interracial love story that didn’t end tragically. Poitier’s compelling presence—articulate, compassionate, softspoken, yet demanding respect from even the most hostile—helped make this possible. Reflecting on the anti-racist agenda of filmmakers during this period, Poitier remarked to Ellicott, “I suited their need. I was clearly intelligent. I was a pretty good actor. I believed in brotherhood, in a free society. I hated racism, segregation. And I was a symbol against those things.”

Of course, Poitier was more than a symbol. At the AFI banquet, reported David J. Fox in the Los Angeles Times, James Earl Jones praised his friend’s work on behalf of the civil rights struggle, declaring, “He marched on Montgomery [Alabama] and Memphis [Tennessee] with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said of Sidney: ‘He’s a man who never lost his concern for the least of God’s children.’” Indeed, Rosa Parks, who in 1955 touched off a crucial battle for desegregation simply by refusing to sit in the “negro” section of a Montgomery bus, attended the tribute and lauded Poitier as “a great actor and role model.”

In 1972 Poitier took a co-starring role with Belafonte in the revisionist western Buck and the Preacher for Columbia Pictures. After a falling out with the director of the picture, Poitier took over; though he and Belafonte urged Columbia to hire another director, a studio representative saw footage Poitier had shot and encouraged him to finish the film himself. “And that’s how I became a director,” he told Los Angeles Times contributor Champlin.

Poitier is best known for helming comedic features co-starring his friend and comedian Bill Cosby; in addition to the trilogy of caper comedies of the 1970s Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again, and A Piece of the Action—they collaborated on the ill-fated 1990 fantasy-comedy Ghost Dad, which was poorly received by both critics and moviegoers. Poitier also directed the hit 1980 comedy Stir Crazy, which starred Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, as well as several other features.

Poitier took only a handful of film roles in the 1980s, but in 1991 he played Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall in the television film Separate but Equal. James Earl Jones described the performance as “a landmark actor portraying a landmark figure, in one of the landmark moments of our history.” And in 1992 he returned to the big screen for the espionage comedy-drama Sneakers, which co-starred Robert Redford, River Phoenix, and Dan Aykroyd. “It was a wonderful, breezy opportunity to play nothing heavy,” he noted to Bary Koltnow of the Orange County Register. “It was simple, and I didn’t have to carry the weight. I haven’t done that in a while, and it was refreshing.”

That year also saw the AFI tribute gala for Poitier, during which the actor welcomed young filmmakers into the fold and enjoined them to “be true to yourselves and be useful to the journey,” reported Daily Variety. “I fully expected to be wise by now,” Poitier noted in his speech, “but I’ve come to this place in my life armed only with the knowledge of how little I know. I enter my golden years with nothing profound to say and no advice to leave, but I thank you for paying me this great honor while I still have hair, and my stomach still has not obscured my view of my shoetops.”

Poitier observed to Champlin that during this “golden age” the demands of art had taken a back seat to domestic concerns to a large degree. “It’s very important, but it’s not the nerve center,” he insisted. “There is the family, and there is music and there is literature” as well as political issues. Poitier noted that he and his wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, travel a great deal since they reside in California and have children in New York, and, as the actor put it, “I live in the world.”

Poitier returned to the small screen for 1995’s western drama Children of the Dust. As a presence, reported
Chris Dafoe of the Los Angeles Times, “it’s apparent that he’s viewed with respect, even awe, by virtually everyone on the set.” He continued to work periodically, including working with his daughter, Sydney—also an actress—and was also the subject of an American Masters documentary, “Sidney Poitier: One Bright Light.” He also re-created the role of Mark Thackery in a sequel to To Sir With Love.

Poitier, who has a dual American-Bahamian citizenship, was appointed as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. He also wrote his second memoir, The Measure of A Man. The audiobook version, which he narrated, won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album. He has also received many honors and awards. In 2002 he received an honorary Oscar for a career that, according to Variety, signaled a turning point for African Americans in film. He was also on hand to witness the second African-American male to win an Oscar for Best Actor, and to see the first African-American female to win for Best Actress.

Poitier has received many awards and honors for both his tremendous body of work in film and his humanitarian efforts. He was named one of the AH’s fifty greatest screen legends. He was presented with the NAACP’s Hall of Fame Award for his constant depiction of positive screen images. He was also honored by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) with a lifetime achievement award. Costar Michael Moriarty observed that Poitier lived up to his legendary status: “You see a face that you’ve grown up with and admired, someone who was an icon of America, a symbol of strength and persistence and grace. And then you find out that… he is everything he symbolizes on screen.” Poitier commented to Parade magazine—quoted by Jet—“I was the only person. It took an awful long time for there to be enough flexibility in attitudes in this business for there to be room for others.” He also stated in Jet, “I’ve been at this game for 52 years. I would only like to continue if what’s ahead of me complements what’s behind me.”

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Career: Actor, director, producer, and executive. First Artists (film production company), founder (with Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen, and Dustin Hoffman), 1969; Walt Disney Co., member of board of directors, 1998. Center Theatre Group, member. Appointed ambassador to Japan from the Bahamas, 1997. University of Southern California, member of board of councilors, School of Cinema and Television. American Museum of the Moving Image, member of board of trustees; also member of Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Charles Drew Medical Group, and Los Angeles Olympic Committee. Worked as a janitor, dishwasher, construction worker, messenger, and longshoreman. Military service: U.S. Army, physiotherapist, 1941–45.

Awards, Honors: Georgio Cini Award, Venice Film Festival, 1958, for Something of Value; Film Award nomination, best foreign actor, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, 1958, for Edge of the City; Silver Berlin Bear, best actor, Berlin International Film Festival, New York Film Critics Award, best actor, and Film Award, best foreign actor, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, all 1958, Academy Award nomination, best actor, Golden Globe Award nomination, best motion picture actor in a drama, and nomination for Golden Laurel Award, top male dramatic performance, all 1959, all for The Defiant Ones; nomination for Golden Laurel Award, top male new personality, 1959; Golden Globe Award nomination, best motion picture actor in a musical or comedy, 1960, for Porgy and Bess; Antoinette Perry Award nomination, best actor in a drama, 1960, for A Raisin in the Sun; Golden Globe Award nomination, best motion picture actor in a drama, and Film Award nomination, best foreign actor, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, both 1962, for A Raisin in the Sun; Silver Berlin Bear, best actor, 1963, Academy Award, best actor, 1964, Golden Globe Award, best actor in a drama, 1964, nomination for Golden Laurel Award, top male dramatic performance, 1964, and Film Award nomination, best foreign actor, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, 1965, all for Lilies of the Field; William J. German Human Relations Award, American Jewish Congress, 1966; Golden Globe Award nomination, best motion picture actor in a drama, 1966, nomination for Golden Laurel Award, male dramatic performance, 1966, and Film Award nomination, best foreign actor, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, 1967, all for A Patch of Blue; Golden Apple Star of the Year Award, Hollywood Women's Press Club, 1967; nomination for Golden Laurel Award, outstanding action performance, 1967, for Ralph Nelson's Duel at Diablo; Golden Globe Award nomination, best motion picture actor in a drama, Film Award, best foreign actor, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and nomination for Golden Laurel Award, male dramatic performance, all 1968, for In the Heat of the Night; Star of the Year Award, National Association of Theatre Owners, 1968; nomination for Golden Laurel Award, outstanding male star, 1968; Prize San Sebastian, best actor, San Sebastian International Film Festival Award, 1968, for For Love of Ivy; Golden Globe Award, male world film favorite, 1969; nomination for Golden Laurel Award, outstanding male star, 1970; decorated knight commander, Order of the British Empire, 1974; Coretta Scott King Book Award, Social Responsibilities Round Table, American Library Association, 1981, for This Life; Cecil B. De Mille Award, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, 1982; Emmy Award nomination, best actor in a miniseries or special, 1991, and Golden Globe Award nomination, best actor in a miniseries or television movie, 1992, both for Separate But Equal; Life Achievement Award, American Film Institute, 1992; Thurgood Marshall Award, 1993; Career Achievement Award, National Board of Review, 1994; Kennedy Center Honor, 1995; Image Award nomination, outstanding actor in a television movie, miniseries, or drama special, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1996, for Children of the Dust; Emmy Award nomination, outstanding lead actor in a miniseries or special, 1997, Screen Actors Guild Award nomination, outstanding performance by a male actor in a television movie or miniseries, 1998, Golden Satellite Award nomination, best actor in a miniseries or television movie, International Press Academy, 1998, and Image Award, outstanding lead actor in a television movie, miniseries or drama special, 1998, all for Mandela and de Klerk; Blockbuster Entertainment Award nomination, favorite supporting actor in a suspense movie, 1998, for The Jackal; Image Award, outstanding actor in a television movie, miniseries, or dramatic special, 2000, for The Simple Life of Noah Dearborn; Life Achievement Award, Screen Actors Guild, 2000; inducted into Hall of Fame, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Grammy Award, best spoken–word album, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, 2001, for The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography; Honorary Academy Award, 2002; Living Legend Award, Trumpet Awards, 2002; also received star on Hollywood Walk of Fame.

CREDITS

Film Appearances:

From Whom Cometh My Help (documentary short film), U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1949.

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At a 1992 banquet sponsored by the august American Film Institute (AFI), a bevy of actors, filmmakers, and others gathered to pay tribute to Sidney Poitier. Superstar Denzel Washington called the veteran actor and director”a source of pride for many African Americans,” the Los Angeles Times reported, while acting luminary James Earl Jones ventured that his colleague had”played a great role in the life of our country.” Poitier himself was typically humble in the face of such praise, but he has acknowledged that his presence on film screens in the 1950s and 1960s did much to open up larger and more nuanced roles for black performers.”I was selected almost by history itself,” he averred to Susan Ellicott of the LondonTimes.

After gracing dozens of films with his dignified, passionately intelligent presence, Poitier began to focus increasingly on directing; a constant in his life, however, has been his work on behalf of charitable causes. And he has continued to voice the need for film projects that, as he expressed it toLos Angeles Times writer Charles Champlin,”have a commonality with the universal human condition.”

Born in Miami, Florida, but raised in the Bahamas, Poitier experienced severe poverty as a boy. His father, a tomato farmer,”was the poorest man in the village,” the actor recalled in an interview with Frank Spotnitz for American Film.”My father was never a man of self-pity,” he continued, adding that the elder Poitier”had a wonderful sense of himself. Every time I took a part, from the first part, from the first day, I always said to myself, This must reflect well on his name.’” The family moved from the tiny village of Cat Island to Nassau, the Bahamian capital, when Poitier was 11 years old, and it was there that he first experienced the magic of cinema.

After watching rapt as a western drama transpired on the screen, Poitier recollected gleefully to Chris Dafoe of the Los Angeles Times, he ran to the back of the theater to watch the cowboys and their horses come out. After watching the feature a second time, he again went out to wait for the figures from the screen to emerge.”And when I told my friends what had happened, they laughed and they laughed and they said to me, ’Everything you saw was on film.’ And they explained to me what film was. And I said, ‘Go on.’”

Served briefly in U .S. Army; worked as dishwasher and as janitor at American Negro Theater, New York City, early 1940s Stage appearances include Days of Our Youth, Lysistrata, Anna Lucasta, and A Raisin in theSun. Film appearances includeNo Way Out, 1949,Cry, the Beloved Country, 1952, The Blackboard Jungle, 1955, Edge of the City, 1957, Something of Value, 1957, The Defiant Ones, 1958, Porgy and Bess, 1959, All the Young Men, 1960, A Raisin in the Sun, 1961, Lilies of the Field, 1963, The Long Ships, 1964, The Bedford Incident, 1965, The Greatest Story Ever Told, 1965,A Patch of Blue, 1965, The Slender Thread, 1965, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967, In the Heat of the Night, 1967, To Sir, With Love, 1967, For Love of Ivy, 1968, The Lost Man, 1969, They Call Me Mr. Tibbs, 1970, Buck and the Preacher, 1972, A Warm December, 1973, Uptown Saturday Night, 1974, let’s Do It Again, 1975,A Piece of the Action, 1977 Shoot to Kill 1988, Little Nikita, 1988, Separate but Equal(television film), 1991, Sneakers, 1992, and Children of the Dust (television film), 1995, White Man’s Burden, 1995. Directed Buck and the Preacher, A Warm December, Uptown Saturday Night, Lets Do It Again, A Piece of the Action, Stir Crazy, 1980, Hanky-Panky, 1982, Fast Forward, 1985, and Ghost Dad, 1990, Named to board of directors of Walt Disney Corporation, 1994.

Awards: Academy Award for best actor, 1964, for Lilies of the Field; Life Achievement Award, American Film institute, 1992.

Poitier made his way to New York at age 16, serving for a short time in the Army. He has often told the story of his earliest foray into acting, elaborating on different strands of the tale from one recitation to the next. He was a teenager, working as a dishwasher in a New York restaurant.”I didn’t study in high school,” he told American Filmjs Spotnitz.”I never got that far. I had no intentions of becoming an actor.” Seeing an ad for actors in the Amsterdam News, a Harlem-based newspaper, he went to an audition at the American Negro Theater.”I walked in and there was a man there—big strapping guy. He gave me a script.”

The man was Frederick O’Neal, a cofounder of the theater; impatient with young Poitier’s Caribbean accent and shaky reading skills, O’Neal lost his temper:”He came up on the stage, furious, and grabbed me by the scruff of my pants and my collar and marched me toward the door,” the actor remembered to Los Angeles Times writer Champlin.”Just before he threw me out he said, ’Stop wasting people’s time! Why don’t you get yourself a job as a dishwasher.’” Stunned that O’Neal could perceive his lowly status, Poitier knew he had to prove his antagonist wrong.”I have, and had, a terrible fierce pride,” Poitier told the audience at the American Film Institute fête, as reported by Daily Variety.”I determined right then I was going to be an actor.”

Poitier continued in his dishwashing job; in his spare time he listened assiduously to radio broadcasts, he noted to Champlin,”trying to lighten the broad A that characterizes West Indian speech patterns.” He had some help in one aspect of his informal education, however: Daily Variety quoted his speech at the AFI banquet, in which he thanked”an elderly Jewish waiter in New York who took the time to teach a young black dishwasher how to read, persisting over many months.” Ultimately, Poitier returned to the American Negro Theater, persuading its directors to hire him as a janitor in exchange for acting lessons.

Poitier understudied for actor-singer Harry Belafonte in a play called Days of Our Youth, and an appearance one night led to a small role in a production of the Greek comedy Lysistrata.Poitier, uncontrollably nervous on the latter play’s opening night, delivered the wrong lines and ran off the stage; yet his brief appearance so delighted critics, most of whom otherwise hated the production, that he ended up getting more work.”I set out after that to dimensionalize my understanding of my craft,” he told Champlin.

Poitier made his film debut in the 1950 feature No Way Out, portraying a doctor tormented by the racist brother of a man whose life he couldn’t save. Director Joseph Mankiewicz had identified Poitier’s potential, and the film bore out the filmmaker’s instincts. Poitier worked steadily throughout the 1950s, notably in the South African tale Cry, the Beloved Country, the classroom drama The Blackboard Jungle, and the taut The Defiant Ones, in which Poitier and Tony Curtis played prison escapees manacled together; their mutual struggle helps them look past racism and learn to respect each other. Poitier also appeared in the film version of George Gershwin’s modern opera Porgynd Bess.

It was in the 1960s, however—with the civil rights movement spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others gathering momentum—that Poitier began to make his biggest mark on American popular culture. After appearing in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun,, in a role he’d developed on the stage, he took the part of an American serviceman in Germany in the 1963 production Lilies of the Field.This role earned him a best actor statuette at the Academy Awards, making him the first black actor to earn this honor.

“Most of my career unfolded in the 1960s, which was one of the periods in American history with certain attitudes toward minorities that stayed in vogue,” Poitier reflected to Ellicott of the London Times.“I didn’t understand the elements swirling around. I was a young actor with some talent, an enormous curiosity, a certain kind of appeal. You wrap all that together and you have a potent mix.”

The mix was more potent than might have been anticipated, in fact; by 1967 Poitier was helping to break down filmic barriers that hitherto had seemed impenetrable. In To Sir, With Love Poitier played a charismatic schoolteacher, while In the Heat of the Night saw him portray Virgil Tibbs, a black detective from the North who helps solve a murder in a sleepy southern town and wins the grudging respect of the racist police chief there. Responding to the derisive labels flung at him, Poitier’s character glowers, “They call me Mister Tibbs.” The film’s volatile mixture of suspense and racial politics eventually spawned two sequels starring Poitier and a television series (Poitier did not appear in the small screen version).

Even more stunning, Poitier wooed a white woman in the comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; his fiancée’s parents were played by screen legends Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The film was considered a watershed because it was Hollywood’s first interracial love story that didn’t end tragically. Poitier’s compelling presence—articulate, compassionate, soft-spoken, yet demanding respect from even the most hostile—helped make this possible. Reflecting on the anti-racist agenda of filmmakers during this period, Poitier remarked to Ellicott, “I suited their need. I was clearly intelligent. I was a pretty good actor. I believed in brotherhood, in a free society. I hated racism, segregation. And I was a symbol against those things.”

Of course, Poitier was more than a symbol. At the AFI banquet, reported David J. Fox in the Los Angeles Times, James Earl Jones praised his friend’s work on behalf of the civil right struggle, declaring, “He marched on Montgomery [Alabama] and Memphis [Tennessee] with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said of Sidney: ‘He’s a man who never lost his concern for the least of God’s children.’” Indeed, Rosa Parks, who in 1955 touched off a crucial battle for desegregation simply by refusing to sit in the “negro” section of a Montgomery bus, attended the tribute and lauded Poitier as “a great actor and role model.”

In 1972 Poitier took a co-starring role with Belafonte in the revisionist western Buck and the Preacher for Columbia Pictures. After a falling out with the director of the picture, Poitier took over; though he and Belafonte urged Columbia to hire another director, a studio representative saw footage Poitier had shot and encouraged him to finish the film himself. “And that’s how I became a director,” he toldLos Angeles Times contributor Champlin.

Poitier is best known for helming comedie features co-starring his friend comedian Bill Cosby; in addition to the trilogy of caper comedies of the 1970s—Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again, and A Piece of the Action—they collaborated on the ill-fated 1990 fantasy-comedy Ghost Dad,which was poorly received by both critics and moviegoers. Poitier also directed the hit 1980 comedy Stir Crazy, which starred Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, as well as several other features.

Poitier took only a handful of film roles in the 1980s, but in 1991 he played Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall in the television film Separate but Equal.James Earl Jones described the performance as “a landmark actor portraying a landmark figure, in one of the landmark moments of our history.” And in 1992 he returned to the big screen for the espionage comedy-drama Sneakers, which co-starred Robert Redford, River Phoenix, and Dan Aykroyd. “It was a wonderful, breezy opportunity to play nothing heavy,” he noted to Bary Koltnow of the Orange County Register.“It was simple, and I didn’t have to carry the weight. I haven’t done that in a while, and it was refreshing.”

That year also saw the gala AFI tribute to Poitier, during which the actor welcomed young filmmakers into the fold and enjoined them to “be true to yourselves and be useful to the journey,” reported Daily Variety.“I fully expected to be wise by now,” Poitier noted in his speech, “but I’ve come to this place in my life armed only with the knowledge of how little I know. I enter my golden years with nothing profound to say and no advice to leave, but I thank you for paying me this great honor while I still have hair, and my stomach still has not obscured my view of myshoetops.”

Poitier observed to Champlin that during this “golden age” the demands of art had taken a back seat to domestic concerns to a large degree. “It’s very important, but it’s not the nerve center,” he insisted.”There is the family, and there is music and there is literature” as well as political issues. Poitier noted that he and his wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, travel a great deal since they reside in California and have children in New York, and, as the actor put it, “I live in the world.”

Poitier returned to the small screen for 1995’s western drama Children of the Dust.As a presence, reported Chris Dafoe of the Los Angeles Times, “it’s apparent that he’s viewed with respect, even awe, by virtually everyone on the set.” Costar Michael Moriarty observed that Poitier lived up to his legendary status: “You see a face that you’ve grown up with and admired, someone who was an icon of America, a symbol of strength and persistence and grace. And then you find out that in the everyday, workaday work of doing movies, he is everything he symbolizes on screen.”

For Poitier, the challenge of doing meaningful work involves transcending the racial and social barriers he helped tumble with his early film appearances. He has insisted that large budgets are not necessary to make a mark and that violence too often seems the only way to resolve conflicts on the screen. “We suffer pain, we hang tight to hope, we nurture expectations, we are plagued occasionally by fears, we are haunted by defeats and unrealized hopes,” he said of humans in general in his interview with Champlin, adding that”when you make drama of that condition, it’s almost as if words are not necessary. It has its own language— spoken everywhere, understood everywhere.”

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Sidney Poitier

Sidney Poitier

Actor Sidney Poitier's (born 1924) presence in film during the 1950s and 1960s opened up the possibility for bigger and better roles for black performers.

At a 1992 banquet sponsored by the august American Film Institute (AFI), a bevy of actors, filmmakers, and others gathered to pay tribute to Sidney Poitier. Superstar Denzel Washington called the veteran actor and director "a source of pride for many African Americans, " the Los Angeles Times reported, while acting luminary James Earl Jones ventured that his colleague had "played a great role in the life of our country." Poitier himself was typically humble in the face of such praise, but he has acknowledged that his presence on film screens in the 1950s and 1960s did much to open up larger and more nuanced roles for black performers. "I was selected almost by history itself, " he averred to Susan Ellicott of the London Times.

After gracing dozens of films with his dignified, passionately intelligent presence, Poitier began to focus increasingly on directing; a constant in his life, however, has been his work on behalf of charitable causes. And he has continued to voice the need for film projects that, as he expressed it to Los Angeles Times writer Charles Champlin, "have a commonality with the universal human condition."

Born in 1924 in Miami, Florida, but raised in the Bahamas, Poitier experienced severe poverty as a boy. His father, a tomato farmer, "was the poorest man in the village, " the actor recalled in an interview with Frank Spotnitz for American Film. "My father was never a man of self-pity, " he continued, adding that the elder Poitier "had a wonderful sense of himself. Every time I took a part, from the first part, from the first day, I always said to myself, 'This must reflect well on his name."' The family moved from the tiny village of Cat Island to Nassau, the Bahamian capital, when Poitier was 11 years old, and it was there that he first experienced the magic of cinema.

After watching rapt as a western drama transpired on the screen, Poitier recollected gleefully to Chris Dafoe of the Los Angeles Times, he ran to the back of the theater to watch the cowboys and their horses come out. After watching the feature a second time, he again went out to wait for the figures from the screen to emerge. "And when I told my friends what had happened, they laughed and they laughed and they said to me, 'Everything you saw was on film.' And they explained to me what film was. And I said, 'Go on."'

Thrown Out of First Audition

Poitier made his way to New York at age 16, serving for a short time in the Army. He has often told the story of his earliest foray into acting, elaborating on different strands of the tale from one recitation to the next. He was a teenager, working as a dishwasher in a New York restaurant. "I didn't study in high school, " he told American Film's Spotnitz. "I never got that far. I had no intentions of becoming an actor."
Seeing an ad for actors in the Amsterdam News, a Harlem-based newspaper, he went to an audition at the American Negro Theater. "I walked in and there was a man there—big strapping guy. He gave me a script."

The man was Frederick O'Neal, a cofounder of the theater; impatient with young Poitier's Caribbean accent and shaky reading skills, O'Neal lost his temper: "He came up on the stage, furious, and grabbed me by the scruff of my pants and my collar and marched me toward the door, " the actor remembered to Los Angeles Times writer Champlin. "Just before he threw me out he said, 'Stop wasting people's time! Why don't you get yourself a job as a dishwasher."' Stunned that O'Neal could perceive his lowly status, Poitier knew he had to prove his antagonist wrong. "I have, and had, a terrible fierce pride, " Poitier told the audience at the American Film Institute fête, as reported by Daily Variety. "I determined right then I was going to be an actor."

Poitier continued in his dishwashing job; in his spare time he listened assiduously to radio broadcasts, he noted to Champlin, "trying to lighten the broad A that characterizes West Indian speech patterns." He had some help in one aspect of his informal education, however: Daily Variety quoted his speech at the AFI banquet, in which he thanked "an elderly Jewish waiter in New York who took the time to teach a young black dishwasher how to read, persisting over many months." Ultimately, Poitier returned to the American Negro Theater, persuading its directors to hire him as a janitor in exchange for acting lessons.

Poitier understudied for actor-singer Harry Belafonte in a play called Days of Our Youth, and an appearance one night led to a small role in a production of the Greek comedy Lysistrata. Poitier, uncontrollably nervous on the latter play's opening night, delivered the wrong lines and ran off the stage; yet his brief appearance so delighted critics, most of whom otherwise hated the production, that he ended up getting more work. "I set out after that to dimensionalize my understanding of my craft, " he told Champlin.

Poitier made his film debut in the 1950 feature No Way Out, portraying a doctor tormented by the racist brother of a man whose life he could not save. Director Joseph Mankiewicz had identified Poitier's potential, and the film bore out the filmmaker's instincts. Poitier worked steadily throughout the 1950s, notably in the South African tale Cry, the Beloved Country, the classroom drama The Blackboard Jungle, and the taut The Defiant Ones, in which Poitier and Tony Curtis played prison escapees manacled together; their mutual struggle helps them look past racism and learn to respect each other. Poitier also appeared in the film version of George Gershwin's modern opera Porgy and Bess.

First Black Actor to Win Academy Award

It was in the 1960s, however—with the civil rights movement spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others gathering momentum—that Poitier began to make his biggest mark on American popular culture. After appearing in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, in a role he'd developed on the stage, he took the part of an American serviceman in Germany in the 1963 production Lilies of the Field. This role earned him a best actor statuette at the Academy Awards, making him the first black actor to earn this honor.

"Most of my career unfolded in the 1960s, which was one of the periods in American history with certain attitudes toward minorities that stayed in vogue, " Poitier reflected to Ellicott of the London Times. "I didn't understand the elements swirling around. I was a young actor with some talent, an enormous curiosity, a certain kind of appeal. You wrap all that together and you have a potent mix."

The mix was more potent than might have been anticipated, in fact; by 1967 Poitier was helping to break down filmic barriers that hitherto had seemed impenetrable. In To Sir, With Love Poitier played a charismatic schoolteacher, while In the Heat of the Night saw him portray Virgil Tibbs, a black detective from the North who helps solve a murder in a sleepy southern town and wins the grudging respect of the racist police chief there. Responding to the derisive labels flung at him, Poitier's character glowers, "They call me Mister Tibbs." The film's volatile mixture of suspense and racial politics eventually spawned two sequels starring Poitier and a television series (Poitier did not appear in the small screen version).

Even more stunning, Poitier wooed a white woman in the comedy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; his fiancée's parents were played by screen legends Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. The film was considered a watershed because it was Hollywood's first interracial love story that did not end tragically. Poitier's compelling presence—articulate, compassionate, soft-spoken, yet demanding respect from even the most hostile—helped make this possible. Reflecting on the anti-racist agenda of filmmakers during this period, Poitier remarked to Ellicott, "I suited their need. I was clearly intelligent. I was a pretty good actor. I believed in brotherhood, in a free society. I hated racism, segregation. And I was a symbol against those things."

Key Activist for Civil Rights

Of course, Poitier was more than a symbol. At the AFI banquet, reported David J. Fox in the Los Angeles Times, James Earl Jones praised his friend's work on behalf of the civil right struggle, declaring, "He marched on Montgomery [Alabama] and Memphis [Tennessee] with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said of Sidney: 'He's a man who never lost his concern for the least of God's children."' Indeed, Rosa Parks, who in 1955 touched off a crucial battle for desegregation simply by refusing to sit in the "negro" section of a Montgomery bus, attended the tribute and lauded Poitier as "a great actor and role model."

In 1972 Poitier took a co-starring role with Belafonte in the revisionist western Buck and the Preacher for Columbia Pictures. After a falling out with the director of the picture, Poitier took over; though he and Belafonte urged Columbia to hire another director, a studio representative saw footage Poitier had shot and encouraged him to finish the film himself. "And that's how I became a director, " he told Los Angeles Times contributor Champlin.

Poitier is best known for helming comedic features co-starring his friend comedian Bill Cosby; in addition to the trilogy of caper comedies of the 1970s—Uptown Saturday Night, Let's Do It Again, and A Piece of the Action—they collaborated on the ill-fated 1990 fantasy-comedy Ghost Dad, which was poorly received by both critics and moviegoers. Poitier also directed the hit 1980 comedy Stir Crazy, which starred Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, as well as several other features.

Poitier took only a handful of film roles in the 1980s, but in 1991 he played Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall in the television film Separate but Equal. James Earl Jones described the performance as "a landmark actor portraying a landmark figure, in one of the landmark moments of our history." And in 1992 he returned to the big screen for the espionage comedy-drama Sneakers, which co-starred Robert Redford, River Phoenix, and Dan Aykroyd. "It was a wonderful, breezy opportunity to play nothing heavy, " he noted to Bary Koltnow of the Orange County Register. "It was simple, and I didn't have to carry the weight. I haven't done that in a while, and it was refreshing."

That year also saw the gala AFI tribute to Poitier, during which the actor welcomed young filmmakers into the fold and enjoined them to "be true to yourselves and be useful to the journey, " reported Daily Variety. "I fully expected to be wise by now, " Poitier noted in his speech, "but I've come to this place in my life armed only with the knowledge of how little I know. I enter my golden years with nothing profound to say and no advice to leave, but I thank you for paying me this great honor while I still have hair, and my stomach still has not obscured my view of my shoetops."

Poitier observed to Champlin that during this "golden age" the demands of art had taken a back seat to domestic concerns to a large degree. "It's very important, but it's not the nerve center, " he insisted. "There is the family, and there is music and there is literature" as well as political issues. Poitier noted that he and his wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, travel a great deal since they reside in California and have children in New York, and, as the actor put it, "I live in the world."

Poitier returned to the small screen for 1995's western drama Children of the Dust. As a presence, reported Chris Dafoe of the Los Angeles Times, "it's apparent that he's viewed with respect, even awe, by virtually everyone on the set." Costar Michael Moriarty observed that Poitier lived up to his legendary status: "You see a face that you've grown up with and admired, someone who was an icon of America, a symbol of strength and persistence and grace. And then you find out that in the everyday, workaday work of doing movies, he is everything he symbolizes on screen."

Poitier continued to star in television movies with 1996's To Sir With Love II (directed by Peter Bogdanovich) and the 1997 Showtime docudrama Mandela and de Klerk. The latter tells the story of Nelson Mandela's last years in prison to his election as leader of South Africa. Both received mixed reviews.

For Poitier, the challenge of doing meaningful work involves transcending the racial and social barriers he helped tumble with his early film appearances. He has insisted that large budgets are not necessary to make a mark and that violence too often seems the only way to resolve conflicts on the screen. "We suffer pain, we hang tight to hope, we nurture expectations, we are plagued occasionally by fears, we are haunted by defeats and unrealized hopes, " he said of humans in general in his interview with Champlin, adding that "when you make drama of that condition, it's almost as if words are not necessary. It has its own language—spoken everywhere, understood everywhere."

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Poitier, Sidney

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers
COPYRIGHT 2001 The Gale Group Inc.

POITIER, Sidney

Nationality: American. Born: Miami, Florida, 20 February 1924 (some sources say 1927), grew up in the Bahamas. Education: Attended Western Senior High School and Governor's High School, both in Nassau. Family: Married 1) Juanita Hardy, 1950, daughters: Beverly, Pamela, Sherry, Gina; 2) the actress Joanna Shimkus, 1976, two children. Career: 1942–45—served in the U.S. Army as a physiotherapist; member of the American Negro Theater: in Days of Our Youth and other plays; 1946—Broadway debut in Lysistrata in all-black production; 1948—toured with play Anna Lucasta; 1949—film debut in Signal Corps documentary From Whom Cometh My Help; 1950—fiction film debut in No Way Out; 1959—in stage play A Raisin in the Sun, and in film version, 1961; 1968—directed Broadway play Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights; 1969—co-founder, with Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand, First Artists Productions; 1972—first directed film, Buck and the Preacher. Awards: Best Actor, Berlin Festival, and Best Foreign Actor, British Academy, for The Defiant Ones, 1958; Best Actor Academy Award, and Best Actor, Berlin Festival, for Lilies of the Field, 1963; Life Achievement Award, American Film Institute, 1992; Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, 2000. Address: c/o Verdon Productions, 9350 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212, U.S.A.

Norman, Barry, "Liberty, Equality, and Sidney Poitier," in Radio Times (London), 16 August 1997.

* * *

As the Hollywood film industry ended the twentieth century, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, and Denzel Washington could be counted as major movie stars. But they owe a major part of their success to Sidney Poitier's pioneering efforts three decades earlier. In the late 1950s and through the 1960s Poitier singlehandedly transformed the Hollywood movie's image of the black man from the racist "coon" to the positive hero.

During the 1960s Poitier was the symbol of the liberal Hollywood, a black actor with dignity. But this had not been achieved "overnight," without struggle. During the early 1950s he took what parts he could land, from Joseph Mankiewicz's No Way Out, where he played an educated, bright, and dedicated doctor caught in a heated racial situation, to James Wong Howe's sole credit as a director, the creaky portrait of the Harlem Globetrotters' basketball enterprise, Go, Man, Go! Richard Brooks's somewhat sanitized portrait of inner-city America, Blackboard Jungle, made Poitier a star. Thereafter his presence became a symbol to the rising consciousness about racial segregation in the United States. Noted producers cast him in roles designed for his new image. Most self-conscious was Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones, with black and white chained together trying to escape from a brutal Southern prison camp. Otto Preminger's Porgy and Bess was the director's homage to black life in the South, while in Lilies of the Field Poitier assisted a group of nuns, a "feel good" classic.

During this period he was much honored, winning many awards, from prizes from the Venice and Berlin Film Festivals to a New York Film Critics Award for best actor to the William J. German Human Relations Award from the American Jewish Congress. He won a much-deserved Oscar for Lilies of the Field, and so became a top box-office draw for A Patch of Blue, To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? In 1967 Poitier was rated number seven on a list of top moneymaking stars; the following year he ranked first.

By 1969 he had done so well he was able, with Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen, and Dustin Hoffman to create the First Artists Film Production Company. He had decided then to work within the Hollywood system and become a director, but Buck and the Preacher, A Warm December, and Uptown Saturday Night made precious little money. He returned to acting, with little success. Little Nikita ended his career as a leading man.

Poitier had become a member of the establishment, penning a celebrated autobiography in 1980. His black detective from the North made so famous with In the Heat of the Night was considered radical in the late 1960s. Two decades later no one commented on his roles as an FBI agent. In 1989 he was elected to the Board of Trustees for the American Museum of the Moving Image. In 1992 he was honored with the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award, in 1994 he earned the National Board of Review Career Achievement Award, and in 1995 he was honored with the Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award.

—Douglas Gomery

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Poitier, Sidney

Sidney Poitier

Actor Sidney Poitier's presence in film during the 1950s and 1960s opened up the possibility for bigger and better roles for African American performers.

Poor childhood

Born on February 20, 1924, in Miami, Florida, but raised in the Bahamas, Sidney Poitier was the son of Reginald and Evelyn Poitier. His father was a tomato farmer, and the family was very poor. Still, Poitier later told Frank Spotnitz in American Film that his father "had a wonderful sense of himself. Every time I took a part, from the first part, from the first day, I always said to myself, 'This must reflect well on his name.'" The family moved from the village of Cat Island to Nassau, the Bahamian capital, when Poitier was eleven years old, and it was there that he first experienced the magic of the movies. Poitier returned to Miami at age fifteen to live with his older brother Cyril.

Poitier left for New York City at age sixteen, serving briefly in the army. He then worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Seeing an ad for actors in a newspaper, he went to a tryout at the American Negro Theater. Theater cofounder Frederick O'Neal became impatient with Poitier's Caribbean accent and poor reading skills. "He came up on the stage, furious, and grabbed me by the scruff of my pants and my collar and marched me toward the door," Poitier told the Los Angeles Times. Poitier, determined to succeed, continued working in the restaurant but listened to radio broadcasts in his spare time to improve his speaking. He later returned to the theater and was hired as a janitor in exchange for acting lessons.

Acting career picks up

Poitier served as an understudy (one who learns a performer's lines in case that performer is unable to perform) for actor-singer Harry Belafonte (1927–) in a play called Days of Our Youth, and an appearance one night led to a small role in a production of the Greek comedy Lysistrata. On opening night of the latter play Poitier was so nervous that he delivered the wrong lines and ran off the stage; still, his brief appearance so impressed critics that he ended up getting more work.

Poitier made his film debut in the 1950 feature No Way Out, playing a doctor tormented by the racist (one who is prejudiced against other races) brother of a man whose life he could not save. Poitier worked steadily throughout the 1950s, appearing in the South African tale Cry, the Beloved Country, the classroom drama The Blackboard Jungle, and The Defiant Ones, in which Poitier and
Tony Curtis (1925–) play prison escapees who are chained together; their struggle helps them look past their differences and learn to respect each other.

In the 1960s Poitier began to make his mark on American popular culture. After appearing in the film version of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, in a role he had developed on the stage, Poitier took the part of an American serviceman in Germany in Lilies of the Field (1963). This role earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor, making him the first African American to earn this honor.

Breaking down barriers

In 1967 Poitier appeared in three hit movies. In To Sir, With Love he played a schoolteacher, while in In the Heat of the Night he played Virgil Tibbs, a black detective from the North who helps solve a murder in a southern town and wins the respect of the prejudiced police chief there. In the comedy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, also starring Spencer Tracy (1900–1967) and Katherine Hepburn (1907–), Poitier's character is engaged to a white woman. The film was Hollywood's first love story between members of different races that did not end tragically. Reflecting on the feelings of filmmakers during this period, Poitier remarked to Susan Ellicott of the London Times, "I suited their need. I was clearly intelligent. I was a pretty good actor. I believed in brotherhood, in a free society. I hated racism, segregation [separation based on race]. And I was a symbol against those things."

Of course, Poitier was more than a symbol. David J. Fox reported in the Los Angeles Times that actor James Earl Jones (1931–), at a tribute to Poitier hosted by the American Film Institute (AFI) in 1992, remembered, "He marched on Montgomery and Memphis with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929–1968], who said of Poitier: 'He's a man who never lost his concern for the least of God's children.'" Rosa Parks (1913–), who in 1955 became a civil rights hero simply by refusing to sit in the "negro" section of a Montgomery bus, attended the tribute and praised Poitier as "a great actor and role model."

Begins directing

In 1972 Poitier costarred with Belafonte in the western Buck and the Preacher for
Columbia Pictures. After an argument with the film's director, Poitier took over; though he and Belafonte urged Columbia to hire another director, a studio official saw footage Poitier had shot and encouraged him to finish the film himself. Poitier went on to direct three features starring comedian Bill Cosby (1937–) in the 1970s: Uptown Saturday Night, Let's Do It Again, and A Piece of the Action. They also worked together on the comedy Ghost Dad (1990), which was a disaster. Poitier also directed the hit comedy Stir Crazy (1980), as well as several other features.

Poitier took only a handful of film roles in the 1980s, but in 1991 he played Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) in the television film Separate but Equal. In 1992 he returned to the big screen for the comedy-drama Sneakers, which costarred Robert Redford (1937–) and River Phoenix (1970–1993). The AFI tribute to Poitier also took place in 1992; in his speech he welcomed young filmmakers into the fold and urged them to "be true to yourselves and be useful to the journey," reported Daily Variety.

Later years

Poitier and his wife, actress Joanna Shimkus, travel a great deal because they live in California and have children in New York. Poitier returned to television for 1995's western drama Children of the Dust. He continued to star in television movies with To Sir with Love II (1996) and the Showtime drama Mandela and de Klerk (1997). The latter follows the story of Nelson Mandela's (1918–) last years in prison to his election as leader of South Africa. Both received mixed reviews.

In 2000 Poitier received the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In April of that year, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (the story of his own life) was published. In February 2001 Poitier won a Grammy award for best spoken-word album for his reading of the book. Poitier was presented with the NAACP's (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Hall of Fame Award in March 2001. In March 2002 Poitier was awarded an honorary Academy Award for his long, dignified career. The award was especially meaningful because it came on the same night that African Americans won both the Best Actor (Denzel Washington) and Best Actress (Halle Berry) awards.

For More Information

Bergman, Carol. Sidney Poitier. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

Poitier, Sidney. The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Biography.San Francisco: Harper-SanFrancisco, 2000.

Poitier, Sidney. This Life. New York: Knopf, 1980.

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Poitier, Sir Sidney

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Sir Sidney Poitier, 1927–, Bahamian-American actor, b. Miami, raised in the Bahamas, returned to the United States at 15. The first African-American actor to achieve leading man status in Hollywood films, Poitier combines attractiveness and poise with an innate projection of dignity and self-assurance. Many of his plays and films have directly addressed issues of race, including his Broadway triumph, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959, film 1961), and such films as the pioneering No Way Out (1950), his movie debut; the internationally acclaimed Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), after Alan Paton's novel; The Defiant Ones (1957), the film that established Poitier's reputation; Lilies of the Field (1963; Academy Award); Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967), which treated the subject of interracial marriage; and In the Heat of the Night (1967). He turned to directing in 1971; among his films are Buck and the Preacher (1972), A Patch of Blue (1973), and Stir Crazy (1980). In 1991 he portrayed Thurgood Marshall in the Emmy-winning television film Separate but Equal. Knighted in 1968, he was appointed the Bahamas' ambassador to Japan in 1997.

See his autobiographical works, This Life (1980), The Measure of a Man (2000), and Life beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-granddaughter (2008); biography by A. Goudsouzian (2004).

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Poitier, Sidney

Poitier, Sidney (1927– ) US actor and director. His first major role was in No Way Out (1950). Poitier received an Oscar nomination for best actor in The Defiant Ones (1958). He was the first black actor to win a best actor Academy Award, for Lilies of the Field (1963). Other films include Blackboard Jungle (1955), To Sir, with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (all 1967). The films he directed include Stir Crazy (1980).

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Citation styles

Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA).

Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites:

Modern Language Association

The Chicago Manual of Style

American Psychological Association

Notes:

Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. However, the date of retrieval is often important. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates.

In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list.